“Stalled Blooms,” the newest documentary by Franklin Film School Co-Founder Adam Souza, is set to premier at the Hollywood Theatre in Northeast Portland on Jan. 19. The showing will include a question and answer session with Souza.
The film captures Souza’s trip home to the San Joaquin Valley in California to reconnect with his father, a deeply Christian man diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, who believes his episodes of psychosis are messages from God. It follows a series of conversations during car rides and phone calls, where Souza and his father talk through their past experiences and try to find common ground.
“What I really wanted to explore was this idea that my dad’s Christianity has kind of saved him, yet at the same time, any moment of psychosis has been this misinterpretation of God talking to him,” says Souza. Going into filming, he wanted to approach his dad with the intent to capture the duality between his father’s mental illness and his spirituality.
However, on his first day back in California, Souza’s mother revealed a history of intense fear from Souza’s father’s physical abuse. This history is recorded in court documents from custody proceedings following their divorce when Souza was young, which are shown in the film. “It just kind of complicated that matter, that whole beautiful vision of these dualities [between] religious experience and psychosis,” says Souza. “That was all thrown out the window. I can’t just ignore the trauma that I’m talking about.”
Souza’s moments of doubt and conflict with the direction of the film are captured quite clearly in scenes at the beginning and end, which show a conversation Souza had with himself after leaving his mom on the first day of filming. “I just feel like I’m being weighed down by the trauma and the abuse and the stories that aren’t so good,” he says in the film.
Despite this, he persisted, and “Stalled Blooms” presents his father distant from Souza’s own opinion or the opinions of those in his family. “This is a film that looks squarely in the face of something that he and his brothers experienced and and then says, ‘All right, here’s this thing that happened to us, and I’m going to put it on film, because this is how I process it,’” says Ted Hurliman, director of education & special projects at the Hollywood Theatre and longtime colleague of Souza. “It’s very non–judgmental. It’s not a hit piece on his father. He’s not out to point a finger.”
Souza explains that the crux of the film is not to pick apart his own trauma or open old wounds, but rather to document himself hearing the story of his family from his father’s perspective. “I wanted to present my dad to an audience and allow the audience to make their own interpretation of things,” says Souza.
The main anecdote in the film centers around a 2020 driving incident at a four-way stop. Souza’s father, who was driving, ran the stop sign and got into an accident. His car was impounded, and he spent a few years in a care home during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. “The voice in my head told me to go through the stop sign,” Souza’s father recounts in the film. “If I wouldn’t have been in an accident and felt like the holy spirit was telling me to go through that stop sign … God allowed me to go through that problem to protect me from COVID-19.”
Driving is a recurring theme, and central to Souza’s understanding of his own situation. Many of the shots are taken from the backseat, which paints an image of how he felt as a child, being in the backseat while his dad drove dangerously. “My trauma is a complete lack of control,” he says. “I’m in the back seat of a car. The car is being driven by a person that has strong mental health problems, and I have no control over it, and that’s a traumatic experience.” Through the creation of the film, however, Souza was able to take back control, and continue to heal from the wounds of his past. “Now I feel like I’m in the driver’s seat, now I’m vulnerable enough to make this art.”
Souza hopes his film students see the film as a reflection of his teaching policy that “creativity is vulnerability.” He hopes “Stalled Blooms” can show his students that there is life on the other side of traumatic experiences, and that film can be a way to grow as a person.
“Basically, this film for me is like a badge of honor,” he says. “This is where I come from, and it’s not pretty, but it’s definitely a place for me to be like, this is my post traumatic growth journey, stepping out of this childhood that I had had and being the man I am today.”
